He who dies with the most hard drives win. so here it is, my hard drive cluster. This is a series of external drives by Seagate and Western Digital, including my new 4TB drive by Seagate. For one particular machine it’s a total of 11 external drives and 2 internal drives all totaling 23TB of hard drive space. There is a secondary machine with an additional 6GB of space inside of it. I bought 2x3TB Seagate Barracudas for that machine. If you add up all the drives, it’s 30TB.

So why do I need all that space? I think the better question is, why not? All these drives constitute a massive media collection including thousands of photos from my cameras, my entire DVD collection in ISO and MP4 format, all my music in MP3 format, hundreds of gigs worth of cycling videos and tours, (Tour de France, Tour Down Under, Paris-Nice, etc) hundreds of gigs worth of Virtual Machines for VirtualBox (Windows 2008 R2, Exchange 2010, Windows 2003 Web Edition) and a couple of drives used as backups.

Yeah, it’s a lot of hard drive space, but in this crazy mixed up digital world of ours, a few terabytes doesn’t last as long as it used to.